In the Victorian era—the age of scientific exploration and discovery—taxidermy was a faddish craze. As naturalists brought exotic new species home from other continents, armchair enthusiasts filled their parlors and drawing rooms with glass-domed birds, butterfly cases, even their stuffed pets. Back then, every claw and hoof was transformed into some exciting new object: everything from "zoological lamps" (kerosene lamps made of preserved monkeys, swans, and other creatures) to "His" and "Her" elephant heads. Soon every town in England could support a part-time taxidermist. In fact, taxidermy was a prerequisite skill for any serious naturalist—including Charles Darwin, who hired a freed Guyanese slave to give him lessons; otherwise, he never would have qualified for the position of naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle. And as I write this, animal lovers in Paris have joined forces to rebuild Deyrolle, the cherished taxidermy establishment that burned down in 2008 after 177 years in business.
Celebrities host weddings under the American Museum of Natural History's ninety-four-foot blue whale (which, by the way, isn't taxidermy—no "derm"—but molded fiberglass; they realigned its blowhole in 2002, so now it's anatomically accurate fiberglass). Even Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, is a stuffed display at Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland. However, when I first met the Schwendemans, taxidermy was in one of its reviled phases, the height of the antifur campaigns of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Lynx Educational Trust for Animal Welfare. Advertisements showed beautiful women with flayed dogs draped around their shoulders. People paint-bombed fur coats. It felt creepy (and potentially unsafe) to walk through Schwendeman's door.
Back in New Jersey, when I was telling a hippie-era uncle of mine (who has an unusual tolerance for eccentric behavior) about my trip to Africa, he told me about the Schwendemans. My mother, whose family has lived in the area for as long as the Schwendemans, said, "That dark, dreary place on Main Street that's there year after year? What goes on in there?" Everyone knew the queer little shop, but only the most extreme animal enthusiasts seemed to venture inside. Now I had a reason to visit. More than a reason—a compulsion: the beauty of nature and the harsh reality of death were all mixed up in my mind in a way that I didn't understand then and I'm not sure I fully understand now. More to the point, I had seen skinned animals in Africa. That taboo having been broken made it much easier for me to visit the studio.
Bruce Schwendeman and a cross-eyed snowy owl, circa 1930, met me when I arrived. Bruce is a big, brawny guy with graying auburn hair and beard, blue eyes, and high cheekbones. He blushes easily; otherwise he looks nothing like his father. He was wearing the customary denim apron, spattered with blood and hide paste, and had a pencil behind his ear.
Bruce took over the shop in 1977 when he was twenty-six and has run it ever since, working mostly alone, although David shuffles in every day after his nap. Bruce knows the place like a sick child: the mailman's ring at eleven A.M.; the hum of the ten-by-ten industrial freezer in the basement; the slam of the screen door that leads from the workshop to David's house behind it, where both were raised. As a boy, Bruce was paid twenty-five cents for every deer skull plate he scraped clean, a 500 percent raise from what David himself had earned as a child for the same job.
Bruce has a sign in front that basically sums up his attitude toward greeting people: "If you are a salesman, I'll give you two minutes; if you are a liquor salesman with samples you can stay a little while but then you have to get out." Bruce can be gruff at first. If he's just spent a week mounting hooded mergansers in a heat wave without air conditioning (he had), he can also be short-wicked and curt. However, if he senses that you have a genuine interest in taxidermy, he'll let down his guard and talk reverently about every mount. That day he was gruff. I didn't blame him. I wasn't his usual customer—that is to say, a museum curator, an ornithologist, a park ranger, a zoology professor, a hunter, or a roadkill picker-upper. He calls himself a "taxidermologist," a name he uses to distinguish himself, a museum taxidermist, from the "beer-drinking fraternity" that mounts white-tailed deer assembly-line style. "Only five or ten out of one hundred thousand full- and part-time taxidermists are taxidermologists," he said. "We operate same as a museum. Scientific accuracy must be right on. Nothing's typical."
He coined the term in 1980 after years of having to define what he does for people who consider his shop an animal mortuary, or worse. Lately he's been fielding calls from people who think taxidermists drive taxicabs. "I've got a spider in my sink. What kind is it? Do we give fly-fishing lessons?" he says with a groan, shaking his head, rattling off more such inquiries. "How do I get rid of the squirrels in my attic? There's a turtle crossing our yard; is it dangerous? Do you repair fur coats?" At one point, the calls got so ridiculous, he began logging them. He's been keeping that log for about as many years as he's been documenting his encounters with roadkill
